Jeff Bezos

The Washington Post announced Tuesday that its news app, which was launched late last year on Kindle Fire tablets, is now available on all Android devices.

The app comes with six months of free access to Washington Post journalism for readers who download it through Amazon’s Appstore.

The ongoing development of the app continues the Post’s adherence to a course charted by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013. According to Washington Post reporter Steven Mufson, Bezos’ vision for the business future of the newspaper included “a new ‘daily ritual bundle’ that would combine a wide variety of material.”

The expanded offering is the latest creation of Project Rainbow, The Washington Post’s in-house innovation lab for news and tech. In recent months, staffers there have been tinkering with The Post’s digital offerings, serving up two different versions of the outlet’s site to readers in an effort to foster serendipity. Read more

It concedes that there are many spots where “journalism is quite different from e-commerce: It is a lot harder to monopolize the market in ideas than to dominate the selling of books and baubles.” To wit:

The Post is in a business where competition for attention, and advertising, is far stronger than that Amazon faced when it was establishing itself. Other digital firms, including Facebook and Google, continue to disrupt the news business. Facebook is striking deals with newspapers in which it posts their articles directly on its platform in return for a cut of advertising revenues.

The only live question is whether the Sulzberger family would sell. Through a spokesman Sulzberger said Friday, as he has many times before, that the company was not on the market whatever the offer.

Case closed? Not quite. The Wall Street Journal was not for sale until Murdoch’s News Corp. made the Bancroft family an offer — 67 percent above their shares’ trading value — they felt they could not refuse. Nor did any but the inner circle know the Graham’s Washington Post was for sale until Jeff Bezos bought it in August 2013. Read more

This is important: It will not provide local news. Updates every day at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. Free for six months, a buck for the next six months. (WP) | Post people said owner Jeff Bezos "had made it clear, through meetings with executives and through feedback on ideas and proposals, that The Post’s broad strategy should shift toward growing its national and international audience — in direct contrast to its previous mission of narrowing its focus to local news." (NYT) | The Post also launched "BrandConnect Perspective" Thursday, a native advertising initiative for opinion pieces. First up is Bayer, with "Modern Agriculture is Based on Sound Science." (WP) | Related: Former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli's North Base Media is an investor in Inkl, a "Spotify for media content." (StartupSmart)

Bill Cosby and the media

"I think if you want to consider yourself to be serious, it will not appear anywhere," he warns Brett Zongker after declining to comment on rape allegations.

The country's visa backlog puts people currently stationed there "in an unenviable professional position: Should they leave their posts, they can be pretty sure at this point that their editor won’t be able to replace them." (WP) | "At a news conference in Beijing alongside President Obama, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, appeared to draw a link between unfavorable coverage and access for reporters, saying that the visa problems of news organizations were of their own making." (NYT) | NYT editorial: "A confident regime that considers itself a world leader should be able to handle truthful examination and criticism." (NYT)

CNN will cut 300 jobs: About 130 people have taken buyouts, and 170 more will be laid off, Brian Stelter reports. Parent Turner Broadcasting plans to lay off 1,475 people. (CNN) | “Turner said it was adding 150 employees in growth areas.” (NYT)

How not to talk about sports with anyone: Men’s Health tweeted an image of a woman holding a foam finger under the legend “How to Talk about Sports with Women.” The link led to a slight Teresa Sabga story called “The Secret to Talking Sports with Any Woman.” The mag apologized on Twitter: “It missed the mark and the negative feedback is justified. We’ve deleted it.” (@MensHealthMag) | A brief selection of reactions: “is this a joke?” (@AishaS) | “hi @MensHealthMag, you don’t know me, but i run @ESPNMag’s annual analytics issue.

Iran frees one journalist: Yeganeh Salehi is out of jail, but her husband, Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian, remains in custody. They were arrested July 22. (WP)

NBC News freelancer arrives in U.S. for Ebola treatment: Ashoka Mukpo is on his way to Omaha. (NBC News)

Another view of The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos: “Only a nitwit would root against the health of the daily newspaper in the nation’s capital,” writes David Carr, who says that Executive Editor Marty Baron‘s paper “is in the middle of a great run, turning out the kind of reporting that journalists — and readers — live for.” (NYT) | The Post set a traffic record in September.

Why did the CDC place an embargo on Ebola news? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first case of Ebola in the U.S. Tuesday. (CDC) | The rollout didn’t follow the CDC’s schedule, though. As AP put it, “The CDC initially embargoed the announcement of the diagnosis until 4:30 p.m. CDT, but then lifted the embargo after several news organizations broke that restriction.” | NBC’s story, for instance, was first published at 4:52 p.m. ET. “Which means, by the way, unless NBC’s standards have changed dramatically recently, which I doubt, that someone at the CDC went on the record about this before the ‘embargo’ lifted,” Ivan Oransky writes. He also notes another problem with the press release: “When you put ‘For Immediate Release’ and ‘Embargoed’ on the same press release about @#$% Ebola, you get the blame for the broken embargo.” (Embargo Watch) | In 2007, Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg got a scoop based on info he got independently and other news orgs had agreed to embargo.

Gannett will split publishing, broadcast assets: Its acquistion of broadcast companies and the 73 percent of Cars.com it didn’t own make this “the right time for a separation,” CEO Gracia Martore says in a statement. Robert J. Dickey will run the publishing company, which be called Gannett and will hold USA Today and 81 dailies, plus the U.K.’s Newsquest. (Poynter) | Just yesterday, Ken Doctor asked whether Gannett would be the next big media company to split its assets. (Nieman) | Rick Edmonds explained the rash of splits last week. Newspaper groups can “theoretically do better with management whose exclusive focus is on the particular challenges of that industry,” he wrote. (Poynter)

Let us now observe Rupert Murdoch’s mating dance: Time Warner’s “unyielding stance has at least some analysts wondering if an acquisition really is inevitable,” Jonathan Mahler writes.

Proceeds from the sale will go to TheDream.US, “a scholarship fund founded by Donald Graham to help undocumented students,” Kennicott writes.

Graham Holdings is moving out of the Washington Post building next month to a space with “very few walls,” GraHoCo spokesperson Rima Calderon tells Kennicott.

The collection “is much like the family: Unflashy and deeply local in its focus,” Kennicott writes.

Artists associated with the Washington Color school—Sam Gilliam, Jacob Kainen, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, among others—are well represented, as are national figures such as Alex Katz, whose work was originally in the Newsweek corporate collection in New York.